Colombia struggles with land restitution

COLOMBIA

Published 10:57 pm, Saturday, December 8, 2012

Mampujan, Colombia -- The jungle owns Mampujan, this once-prosperous farming town near the Caribbean coast that has become a symbol of Colombia's descent into lawlessness.

Paramilitary fighters invaded the town in early 2000 and accused residents of sympathizing with leftist guerrillas. They rounded up hundreds of people in the main square, threatened to kill them and ordered them to depart their homes and farms. The residents all fled.

Today, the square is choked with weeds. Bats roost in the one house that still has a roof. Green paint peels from a blackboard in the derelict schoolhouse.

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Bringing people back to Mampujan and other rural communities that have been terrorized for decades by guerrillas, paramilitary groups and drug traffickers has become a priority for the Colombian government, which has begun an ambitious nationwide program to give millions of acres of land back to tens of thousands of displaced farmers. But the effort has been complicated both by the logistical difficulty of sorting out who owns long-abandoned or disputed plots and the extreme fear that still lingers among those who left.

Love for land

"The love I have for my land, I haven't lost it," said Marquesa Lopez, 61, recalling the 64 acres where she and her family grew yucca and corn and raised cattle. Like other displaced residents of Mampujan, she eventually moved to a makeshift settlement outside the nearby town of Maria la Baja.

"I had my family, my banana trees, my coconut palms, my chickens," she said. "Now, I want to live that life again."

In October, a special agrarian judge gave Lopez and her husband, Carlos Arturo Maza, and 13 other Mampujan families title to the land they lost, the first such decision under a new land restitution law that is the centerpiece of the government's effort to address the effects of years of violence and long-standing inequalities in rural areas.

The unequal distribution of land in Colombia's impoverished countryside, where poor farmers were pushed aside or exploited by wealthy landowners, was a major factor in the creation of the FARC nearly 50 years ago, and it has continued to fuel the conflict.

Key bargaining chip

Now, the government sees the land restitution law as a crucial lever at the bargaining table.

"This is something that takes away one of their banner issues," President Juan Manuel Santos said in October.

But for that to be true, Santos has to deliver on the program's promise, an enormous and intensely complex task.

The government has received more than 27,000 claims for close to 5 million acres of land, and more are pouring in. Each claim must be investigated and then considered by a judge. Many are dauntingly complex, involving ownership disputes with little or no documentation.

"Of course it's complicated, and it's difficult, but what was the alternative?" said Juan Camilo Restrepo, the agriculture minister. "To do nothing? Which is what some people wanted to happen, to do nothing and validate with silence and inaction 25 years of land takeovers."

Critics say the process has been too slow and unwieldy, and they question the government's commitment to face down powerful landowners and their political allies.

"It would be very sad if this ends up where you have 10 cases that will go down in history where, yes, we were able to do this, and thousands of cases in which it couldn't be done," said Ivan Cepeda, an opposition lawmaker.

Restrepo said that about 300 people have reported being threatened in relation to land claims under the new program and that the government has taken measures to protect 159 of them, in many cases providing bodyguards.

Mayerlis Angarita, 32, an activist who visits remote villages encouraging people to make land claims in the region of low mountains around Mampujan, called Montes de Maria, travels with a government-assigned bodyguard because of repeated threats.

Target of gunman

On Aug. 28, a gunman shot at her on the streets of her hometown, San Juan Nepomuceno. She was not hit but was injured while running to take cover.

"Peace is built here on the back roads," she said, as her bodyguard drove a bulletproof SUV in an area where former paramilitary fighters still enforce a nighttime curfew to keep local roads clear for drug trafficking. "They cannot force us out of here."

But many activists have fled. In recent weeks, menacing fliers have been circulated, signed by a group called the Anti-Restitution Army. Activists believe the flyers are linked to landowners and their allies among the paramilitaries and drug traffickers.

"The armed groups and criminal mafias that were involved in the displacement in the first place continue to operate," said Max Schoening, the Colombia researcher for Human Rights Watch. "Unless you dismantle those groups and hold them accountable, you're not going to eradicate the underlying source of threats and intimidation."

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